Glossary

Each word below names one thing, on every screen, on public pages and in exports. Where two words are easy to confuse, the entry says how they differ.

Project structure

Project

Everything you build and publish together: its lines, lexicons, inventories, orthographies and features. A project can hold one language or a whole family of them; Lemula does not decide which. Plans count projects.

Family

A project's lines and the tree they form: the root lines, and the branches that split from them.

Line

A line of descent, also called a language line: the stages a language goes through, in order. A root line starts from its own words at its first stage. A branch splits from another line at one of its stages and starts from the words that line has there. Whether a line stands for a language or a dialect is up to you.

Stage

A named point on a line, with an optional date or span of time. The changes between two stages carry every word from one to the next. A stage can hold a lexicon, an inventory and the orthographies its words are written in.

Words and forms

Word

A word as a line carries it from stage to stage: one pronounced form, with its own meaning and features. Each inflected form, such as a case, is a word of its own. A word keeps its identity while its form changes, so it has a history, a column in the matrix and a page of its own when published.

The words a root line starts from are its starting words.

Form

How a word sounds at a stage, written in IPA. A word has one form at each stage. An orthography writes a form as a spelling.

Expected form

The form a lexicon gives for a word at a stage scored against it. The matrix shows it beside the form the line derives, and the Score tab counts where the two agree.

Lists

Lexicon

A list of entries, cited from a source or written by you, and marked attested or reconstructed. A lexicon is attached to a stage in one of two roles. On the first stage of a root line, the line starts from it: its words are the ones every rule of the line runs over. On a later stage, the stage is scored against it.

A stage scored against a lexicon reads it in one of two modes. In compare mode the rules stay the source of truth, and each disagreement is reported. In replace mode the lexicon's form takes over from that stage on.

A lexicon is what you write. A dictionary is what Lemula publishes.

Entry

One row of a lexicon: a form with its features, and the word reference it is about when it has one. An entry is a claim a lexicon makes, so it can find one word of a line, several or none. A word belongs to a line; an entry belongs to a lexicon. Plan limits count entries per lexicon.

Score

The stage tab that sets the words a line derives at a stage against the lexicon the stage is scored against. Each word lands in one of four groups. Agree and Diverge hold the words both have, with the same form or with different ones. Not derived holds the words the lexicon has and the line does not derive. Unattested holds the words the line derives and the lexicon does not mention.

Dictionary

A line's words as its public page lists them, each with its form, spelling and translation. Lemula builds it from what the line derives when you publish. Readers can go through it by word or by translation, letter by letter and page by page.

Sounds

Sound

One unit of IPA as Lemula reads a form: a base symbol with its diacritics, or symbols joined by a tie bar. t͡ʃ is one sound written with three symbols. Lemula makes no phonemic analysis, so a sound is what the transcription says, with no claim about which sounds contrast.

Symbol

One character of the IPA chart: a base letter or a diacritic. Symbols make up sounds.

Inventory

A list of sounds you declare for a language, optionally attached to stages. It never changes what the rules derive. A stage's Sounds tab shows the sounds its words carry and sets them against the inventory in force there.

Writing

Orthography

A table that says how sounds are written in letters. A project can hold several, and one stage or lexicon can be written in more than one: Serbian in Cyrillic and Latin, or Russian before and after a reform. An orthography writes forms and nothing else, so it never changes what the rules derive. Stress is either left unwritten or marked with an acute over the stressed vowel.

Row

One row of an orthography's table: a sound or a run of sounds, the letters they are written with, and an optional environment. Rows of one sound can take their letters from the common practice of a script. Rows of several sounds, such as ks → x, are written by hand.

Letters

What a row writes for its sounds. A row with no letters yet leaves its sound in IPA, marked as unspelled.

Spelling

A form written in an orthography. Lemula writes it word by word, taking at each point the longest run of sounds the table has a row for. Among rows of the same length, the first one whose environment holds wins, and a row with no environment covers the rest. A sound no row writes stays in IPA.

Spellings appear beside the IPA form in lexicons and stages, on public pages and in CSV exports.

Changes

Change

One item of the ordered list between two stages of a line. Changes run in their order, and each one is of one of the kinds below. A plan counts changes per project.

Rule

One line of sound change notation, such as p > b / V_V. A sound change can hold several rules, and a word's history names the ones that fired.

Sound change

A regular change, written as rules, applied to every form that fits them.

New word

A word that enters the line at this point: coined there, or one the line had all along.

Borrowing

A word taken from another line of the project at one of its stages, or written out from elsewhere. It arrives as it stands there, then goes through the changes that follow.

Compound

Two or more words joined into one, with an affix among them if you like. What happens where they meet is left to the sound changes after it.

Derivation

A new word made from another, its form written out or produced by a rule of its own, such as an agent noun from a verb.

Semantic split

One word becomes two, alike in form and apart in meaning.

Feature shift

The words already there come to carry different features, such as a new meaning or part of speech.

Clipping

A word loses characters off one end where no regular rule explains it.

Loss

A word falls out of use. Its public page says at which stage.

Environment

Where a rule applies, written after a slash. In p > b / V_V the environment is V_V, between two vowels. The underscore stands for the sound that changes, # for the edge of a word, and an exception follows //.

Orthography rows use the same notation: a row k → qu held to _{e,i} writes qu before e and i.

Features

Feature

A property a word or an entry carries, such as part of speech, gender or a gloss. The features screen declares them for the whole project, and their order is the order of the lexicon's columns. A condition that picks words can test a feature or the form.

Value types

How a feature takes its values. A fixed list allows only the values it names. A suggested feature offers its values and takes new ones. Free text takes any value. An annotation is free text shown beside a word and never used to look a word up, such as a definition or a translation.

Gloss

A short label for a word's meaning. Every word has one, and Lemula names words by it in the editor, in conditions that pick words, and in borrowings that look a word up in another line. A gloss can hold several values.

A gloss is the author's working label and can be technical. Public pages show a translation in its place when the project has one.

Translation

A free-text feature marked to stand for a word's meaning on public pages. Its name says which language it is written in: new projects start with one called English. A project marks one such feature at most. Where none is marked, or a word has no translation, public pages show the gloss.

Lemula never looks a word up by its translation; the gloss does that. The public dictionary can also be read from translation to word.

Editing and publishing

Draft

The edits made in the editor and not applied yet. They stay on your device until you apply them, and Apply stores them in the project.

Run

Working out every word of a line through its changes. The editor runs a line in your browser after each edit; a change held out of the run is a local experiment that Apply does not store.

Columns

The words the matrix draws, one column each. Every other word still runs.

Preview

A build of a project's public pages that only you can see. Publishing makes the same pages public.

Public page

The pages a published project has at its own address: the project with its lines, each line's dictionary, and a page for every word with its history.

Cognates

Words on other lines that descend from the same earlier word. A word's public page lists them with the form each has at the end of its line.